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Thursday, March 21, 2013

Ten Years On Bombs Over Baghdad

by VIJAY PRASHAD
Roaming through the al-Jazeera Arabic headquarters in Doha,
Qatar, last month, I was struck by its wall of relics. Behind glass lay
the remains of their journalists who were either killed in action or
else held in Guantanamo under false pretenses. The one tableaux that
most affected me was that of Tareq Ayyoub (1968-2003), the reporter
killed when US forces fired on the al-Jazeera station in Baghdad on
April 8, 2003 – three weeks into the Iraq War. It was a day when the
blood of journalists flowed through the streets of the city: US aircraft
struck Abu Dhabi Television’s station that day, and a US Abrams Tank
struck the Palestine Hotel, killing Taras Protsyuk (Reuters) and Jose
Couso (Telecinco).
After an internal US investigation, General Colin Powell said, “Our
forces responded to hostile fire appearing to come from a location later
identified as the Palestine Hotel.” Nothing was further from the truth.
Journalist Robert Fisk was on the ground in Baghdad. He wrote at that
time, “I was between the tank and the hotel when the shell was fired.
There was no sniper fire – nor any rocket-propelled grenade fire, as the
American officer claimed – at the time. French television footage of
the tank, running for minutes before the attack, shows the same thing.
The soundtrack – until the blinding, repulsive golden flash from the
tank barrel – is silent.” Mohamed Jassem al-Ali, al-Jazeera’s then head,
had given the US the coordinates to its Baghdad station so as to
protect it from attack; it was precisely those coordinates that were
targeted. A month later, al-Ali was fired by al-Jazeera allegedly for
hiring three “Iraqi agents” to work at the station. Pressure to silence
the buzz of criticism from al-Jazeera and to remove the images of
civilian casualties and suffering from its screens was fierce.
During the war, the US government either embedded journalists or tried
to excise them. The war could have only one story-line, particularly
given the unseemly means by which the US and the UK went into the war:
with lies and evasions told to the UN to strong-arm a compliant set of
governments into allowing the Bush-Blair team its way against an already
prone Saddam Hussein and his regime. Now, with the war gone ten years,
the challenge has been to try to remind ourselves that it happened in
the first place. The US “withdrawal” of troops in 2011 is treated as an
opportunity to withdraw the world’s attention from Iraq. We are told to
forget the criminal
conspiracy that led the North Atlantic into a war of aggression. We are
told to forget the way a country has been systematically destroyed not
only since March 19, 2003, but perhaps since the West colluded with
Saddam Hussein’s regime against Iran in 1980, flattering Hussein’s
immense ego to take his people into a murderous conflict with its
neighbor (1980-88), selling Hussein’s army chemical materials to allow
him to launch them against the restive Kurds (1983-88), and then trying
to contain his ambitions when he came asking for payment for Iraq’s
services to the West against Iran (1989-91). There is an imposed amnesia
about imperial motives and war aims, about the fact that many opposed
the war on grounds that came to pass, and about the sheer suffering
about the war.
What have we forgotten?
* The total number of dead – a figure impossible to fathom, somewhere
near a million or maybe higher (the Lancet’s figure from 2006 if updated
would lead us higher yet).
* The total number of refugees – around seven million according to the
UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Many fled to Syria, where the
two-year bloody war has now left these Iraqis in a position of great
peril.
* The destruction of infrastructure – now reconstructed on lines that favor the sectarian impulses of the new political class.
* The war crimes – Abu Ghraib, Falluja, the very rush to war itself.
Obama, who had staked out his own position on the impending Iraq War
clear in 2002 (“a dumb war, a rash war”), could not revisit them in
2011: he was now the Commander in Chief and would find it awkward to
belittle the sacrifices of troops who were sent to fight a false war. At
most Obama could acknowledge the debate before the war, with the
lead-up “a source of great controversy here at home, with patriots on
both sides of the debate.” The Iraq war was not perfect, he accepted,
but its outcome was good, with the troops leaving behind “a sovereign,
stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was
elected by its people.” American liberalism is not capable of any more
than that. It is why American liberalism will not be willing to register
its complicity in such a grotesque imperialist project, nor be willing
to break with that project in the first place. Too much is to be gained
through its silence.
To go beyond Obama’s anodyne comments from last year is to accept that
Iraq was not a “dumb war” but the outcome of a system premised on
militarism and one that is capable of the harshest violence against its
enemies. During the week of the US withdrawal from Iraq, a reporter for
The New York Times found 400 pages of US military investigations on the
2005 massacres at Haditha, where US marines killed 24 Iraqis (including a
76-year-old man in a wheelchair, children and toddlers). Most of the US
troops had been acquitted by their justice system, leaving a bad taste
in the Iraqi body politic. As Michael Schmidt put it in The Times, “That
sense of American impunity ultimately poisoned any chance for American
forces to remain in Iraq, because the Iraqis would not let them stay
without being subject to Iraqi laws and courts, a condition the White
House could not accept.”
It was the aftermath of Haditha that forced the Iraqi government to no
longer give a carte blanche to US troops. The Iraqi Parliament, in a
sense, ejected the US because Washington would not allow its troops to
come under Iraqi jurisdiction. That is how the Iraq War finally ended –
not with a withdrawal but with an ejection.
I write this essay in New Delhi, remembering the day ten years ago when
Shock and Awe began and remembering the months that led to the war. I
remember two friends and teachers who departed over this decade, and
write these words with their memory in mind – Edward Said (1935-2003)
and Alexander Cockburn (1941-2012). Till the very end, Said, who died
ten years ago, held fast against the imperialist project. Not long
before he died, Said told al-Ahram that he felt that the imperialist
states wanted to “terminate some countries” and “install regimes
friendly to the United States,” a “dream that has very little basis in
reality. The knowledge they have of the Middle East, to judge from the
people who advise them, is to say the least out of date and widely
speculative.” There were no flowers and sweets thrown to US troops as
Fouad Ajami and Kanan Makiya assumed; more likely the troops were fired
upon or found themselves victims to roadside bombs. I saw Edward speak
bravely in late 1990 against Gulf War 1 in Chicago, when the tide was
decidedly in favor of that bombardment and only a handful of people saw
the ruse for what it was.
One of those other people was Alexander Cockburn. During 2002-03, I had
several wonderful interactions with Alexander as he edited the essays I
wrote for CounterPunch on the lead-up to the war. There was no fine line
to be walked – the war was being based on false pretenses. We already
knew that, and Alexander encouraged as much honest writing as possible
against imperial mendacity on Iraq. I remember once asking him how he
kept his nerve. His ancestor had burned down the White House, he told
me. Nothing his pen can do matches that. High standards set by his past,
not only for him but also for journalists with the memory of Tareq,
Taras and Jose in mind.
Vijay Prashad’s new book, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, is out this month from Verso Books.
Ganashakti